Legito PowerUp 2022: Legal team challenges within a fast growing company

Jul 19, 2022 | PowerUp 2022

Legito PowerUp 2022: Legal team challenges within a fast growing company

Kamile Valatkaite is a senior legal counsel with Vinted – the company that is promoting sustainable consumption by providing a marketplace for selling and buying second-hand items, mainly clothing. 

Kamile’s presentation was about the particular challenges faced by a legal team supporting a fast-growing company. Within two years, the legal team grew from 2 to 40 people. At first, two people had to cover everything, but the team’s growth allowed them to build structures and responsibilities – Kamile’s org chart would look familiar to the legal team in many large organizations. Kamile says she is “a huge legal design advocate”.  

“Changes come quickly and often, making it hard to plan.”

 

In a start-up environment, Kamile says, changes come quickly and often, making it hard to plan. They have to adapt to business needs, and if they embark on innovation projects, they have to find additional hours to do the work. 

Kamile focussed on projects for the contracts team. They had been using various software tools to help them, until they recognized that the tools had inadequate access controls, and were starting to look risky, and they felt the security posture of the tools was insufficient. They needed a solution that allowed them to implement proper controls.

A new business requirement caused a sudden and significant increase in B2B contracts. The higher volume of contracts created the opportunity and need to move to adopt templates for more of their contracts.

Legito offered a platform that could help the team adapt to the changing requirements while having the controls, templates, and other tools to drive efficiency.

Legito PowerUp 2022: Legal team challenges within a fast growing company

Kamile Valatkaite is a senior legal counsel with Vinted – the company that is promoting sustainable consumption by providing a marketplace for selling and buying second-hand items, mainly clothing. 

Kamile’s presentation was about the particular challenges faced by a legal team supporting a fast-growing company. Within two years, the legal team grew from 2 to 40 people. At first, two people had to cover everything, but the team’s growth allowed them to build structures and responsibilities – Kamile’s org chart would look familiar to the legal team in many large organizations. Kamile says she is “a huge legal design advocate”. 
 

“Changes come quickly and often, making it hard to plan.”

 

In a start-up environment, Kamile says, changes come quickly and often, making it hard to plan. They have to adapt to business needs, and if they embark on innovation projects, they have to find additional hours to do the work. 

Kamile focussed on projects for the contracts team. They had been using various software tools to help them, until they recognized that the tools had inadequate access controls, and were starting to look risky, and they felt the security posture of the tools was insufficient. They needed a solution that allowed them to implement proper controls.

A new business requirement caused a sudden and significant increase in B2B contracts. The higher volume of contracts created the opportunity and need to move to adopt templates for more of their contracts.

Legito offered a platform that could help the team adapt to the changing requirements while having the controls, templates, and other tools to drive efficiency.

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Try Legito For Free

Legito PowerUp2022: Panel Discussion – Automation and Innovation for Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments

Jul 19, 2022 | PowerUp 2022

Legito PowerUp2022: Panel Discussion – Automation and Innovation for Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments

This panel discussion featured insights from Paul Handal (Head of Legal Tech at a large law firm), Filip Ivanov (a consultant helping organisations to implement legal tech), Teodora Bobcheva (general counsel in a corporate legal team) and Jarmila Hanzalova (head of knowledge management at a law firm).

This contribution from one of the panel members perhaps explains why some organisations often live with sub-optimal results without searching for a solution: too many people assume things cannot be made better because the common experience is that some legal procedures aways seem to take an onerous route.
It took the outside stimulus and experience of a consultant to demonstrate the effectiveness of using a solution like Legito.

Jarmila’s law firm reported a more unusual route to deploying Legito: they began with client-facing projects and then decided they should use Legito internally to augment the law firms internal processes.

 

 

Teodora commented on the benefits of deploying Legito (from her perspective within a corporate legal team):

  • Reduced cycle times to create documents (reduced to 1/5th of the previous drafting time)
  • Living without the annoyance of errors and formatting glitches in documents
  • Total control over the document content, but also the workflow and the customer journey when interacting with documents
  • Using insight from the solution to identify opportunities to make improvements to process and content
  • Using timeline data to understand where delays arise
  • Automating risk scores to assist management when making approval decisions

Paul (who also lectures on legal tech) observed that using Legito to digitise each step of a process inevitably made it easier to automate each successive step – the benefits accumulate as you move through a process.

 

The panel also discussed tips for successful deployments:

  • Be patient – don’t try to automate everything in the first stage. Be strategic about how you expand the initial project. This will promote consistency and optimise the re-use of data across the organisation.
  • Understand the logic of the content of a document, but also think about the customer’s experience of using the document. Take advantage of the tools to give customers tips and guidance to help them navigate their way through a task.
  • Use change management. A good change management project should include exec sponsorship and good communications, remembering to tell people about the benefits of the project.

 

Teodora added two poignant observations about using Legito:

  • Legito allows a corporate legal team to provide a self service tool, but it was important for the legal team to have confidence knowing that the tool would avoid risks and mistakes.
  • Using Legito “…creates a data driven culture…” which helps to move an organisation away from legacy ways of doing business.

 

 

We thank the contributors for their time and insights.

Legito PowerUp2022: Panel Discussion – Automation and Innovation for Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments

This panel discussion featured insights from Paul Handal (Head of Legal Tech at a large law firm), Filip Ivanov (a consultant helping organisations to implement legal tech), Teodora Bobcheva (general counsel in a corporate legal team) and Jarmila Hanzalova (head of knowledge management at a law firm).

This contribution from one of the panel members perhaps explains why some organisations often live with sub-optimal results without searching for a solution: too many people assume things cannot be made better because the common experience is that some legal procedures aways seem to take an onerous route.
It took the outside stimulus and experience of a consultant to demonstrate the effectiveness of using a solution like Legito.

Jarmila’s law firm reported a more unusual route to deploying Legito: they began with client-facing projects and then decided they should use Legito internally to augment the law firms internal processes.

Teodora commented on the benefits of deploying Legito (from her perspective within a corporate legal team):

  • Reduced cycle times to create documents (reduced to 1/5th of the previous drafting time)
  • Living without the annoyance of errors and formatting glitches in documents
  • Total control over the document content, but also the workflow and the customer journey when interacting with documents
  • Using insight from the solution to identify opportunities to make improvements to process and content
  • Using timeline data to understand where delays arise
  • Automating risk scores to assist management when making approval decisions

Paul (who also lectures on legal tech) observed that using Legito to digitise each step of a process inevitably made it easier to automate each successive step – the benefits accumulate as you move through a process.

The panel also discussed tips for successful deployments:

  • Be patient – don’t try to automate everything in the first stage. Be strategic about how you expand the initial project. This will promote consistency and optimise the re-use of data across the organisation.
  • Understand the logic of the content of a document, but also think about the customer’s experience of using the document. Take advantage of the tools to give customers tips and guidance to help them navigate their way through a task.
  • Use change management. A good change management project should include exec sponsorship and good communications, remembering to tell people about the benefits of the project.

Teodora added two poignant observations about using Legito:

  • Legito allows a corporate legal team to provide a self service tool, but it was important for the legal team to have confidence knowing that the tool would avoid risks and mistakes.
  • Using Legito “…creates a data driven culture…” which helps to move an organisation away from legacy ways of doing business.

We thank the contributors for their time and insights.

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Try Legito For Free

Legito PowerUp 2022: Success Story – CLM & Document Automation in a Large Law Firm

Jul 19, 2022 | PowerUp 2022

Legito PowerUp 2022: Success Story – CLM & Document Automation in a Large Law Firm

If we are tempted to assume there is one solution to a problem, get fresh ideas by looking at the problem through the eyes of another culture, another country, or another continent.

Mauricio Jaramillo presented a case study from the largest law firm in Colombia, Gomez-Pinzon. Here’s a deliberate summary of a few sections from Mauricio’s presentation that are not what we usually hear from law firm case studies.

Mauricio described the core challenge like this: how do you persuade the partners of a successful law firm to embark on a digital transformation project to change legal services that had been working successfully for 30+ years? Gomez-Pinzon acknowledged that they did not merely intend to change the way they created documents – they were going to redesign legal practice.

Before deciding the projects to deliver digital transformation, Gomez-Pinzon started by changing how people would respond and adapt. It helped that their organisation attracted young legal professionals keen to build their careers using new technologies. Gomez-Pinzon spent time thinking about how to get people to change the way they thought about their work. Mauricio believed the success of digital transformation would depend on how people embraced it. After they got their colleagues behind the project, they could leave them to continue to build on each new technical innovation so that it did not stall after one project.

Gomez-Pinzon kicked off their document automation strategy with a remarkable project: Mauricio observed that auditors regularly ask law firms to report on legal matters for use in clients’ audits. When he explained the cumbersome procedures for responding to audit requests, the problem was visible, and it raises the question, why has nobody found a better way to handle it? It’s an ideal starting project: it solves a problem that is a recurring administrative nuisance that must be done correctly, and it’s a problem that vexed every team in the organisation. Get that right (and they did), and you open the door to enterprise-wide adoption of the technology for multiple teams.

Having successfully built a solution for audit reports, Mauricio described how Gomez-Pinzon moved to another solution that lawyers will recognise: they automated the production of due-diligence reports. If you’re a lawyer, you will know that DD reports are a joyless but important task in every corporate deal. If you’re not a lawyer, the interesting thing about automating DD reports is that they are not ‘standard’ – an automation solution has to span many variables because the reports cannot be over-simplified.

We thank Mauricio for travelling to Prague to share his experience. They started thinking about people. They built a solution that automated a task that was tedious for people, but a task that must be done correctly. That’s how they began a successful digital transformation.

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Charles Drayson

Charles Drayson

Legito's Chief Community Officer

After a few years of working for a prominent London law firm, I started to get comfortable in my practice area, and I stopped feeling like every project demanded knowledge I didn’t have. And then something happened: I travelled overseas to work on a legal project in the middle east.

I started to work in the same way I worked in London – and it didn’t go too well.
I remember a senior lawyer in a local firm making arguments I had not heard before, and using negotiations in a style I had not experienced. I annoyed my counterparts by trying to do things the way they were done in London, and made no progress until I let go my narrow outlook.

In the years that followed, I was fortunate to work in multiple countries and to spend long periods in some of them. I started to enjoy the experience of different business cultures and legal traditions while observing that we share many of the same challenges.

Legito PowerUp 2022: Success Story – CLM & Document Automation in a Large Law Firm

If we are tempted to assume there is one solution to a problem, get fresh ideas by looking at the problem through the eyes of another culture, another country, or another continent.

Mauricio Jaramillo presented a case study from the largest law firm in Colombia, Gomez-Pinzon. Here’s a deliberate summary of a few sections from Mauricio’s presentation that are not what we usually hear from law firm case studies.

Mauricio described the core challenge like this: how do you persuade the partners of a successful law firm to embark on a digital transformation project to change legal services that had been working successfully for 30+ years? Gomez-Pinzon acknowledged that they did not merely intend to change the way they created documents – they were going to redesign legal practice.

Before deciding the projects to deliver digital transformation, Gomez-Pinzon started by changing how people would respond and adapt. It helped that their organisation attracted young legal professionals keen to build their careers using new technologies. Gomez-Pinzon spent time thinking about how to get people to change the way they thought about their work. Mauricio believed the success of digital transformation would depend on how people embraced it. After they got their colleagues behind the project, they could leave them to continue to build on each new technical innovation so that it did not stall after one project.

Gomez-Pinzon kicked off their document automation strategy with a remarkable project: Mauricio observed that auditors regularly ask law firms to report on legal matters for use in clients’ audits. When he explained the cumbersome procedures for responding to audit requests, the problem was visible, and it raises the question, why has nobody found a better way to handle it? It’s an ideal starting project: it solves a problem that is a recurring administrative nuisance that must be done correctly, and it’s a problem that vexed every team in the organisation. Get that right (and they did), and you open the door to enterprise-wide adoption of the technology for multiple teams.

Having successfully built a solution for audit reports, Mauricio described how Gomez-Pinzon moved to another solution that lawyers will recognise: they automated the production of due-diligence reports. If you’re a lawyer, you will know that DD reports are a joyless but important task in every corporate deal. If you’re not a lawyer, the interesting thing about automating DD reports is that they are not ‘standard’ – an automation solution has to span many variables because the reports cannot be over-simplified.

We thank Mauricio for travelling to Prague to share his experience. They started thinking about people. They built a solution that automated a task that was tedious for people, but a task that must be done correctly. That’s how they began a successful digital transformation.

FULL RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE

Charles Drayson

Charles Drayson

Legito's Chief Community Officer

After a few years of working for a prominent London law firm, I started to get comfortable in my practice area, and I stopped feeling like every project demanded knowledge I didn’t have. And then something happened: I travelled overseas to work on a legal project in the middle east.

I started to work in the same way I worked in London – and it didn’t go too well.
I remember a senior lawyer in a local firm making arguments I had not heard before, and using negotiations in a style I had not experienced. I annoyed my counterparts by trying to do things the way they were done in London, and made no progress until I let go my narrow outlook.

In the years that followed, I was fortunate to work in multiple countries and to spend long periods in some of them. I started to enjoy the experience of different business cultures and legal traditions while observing that we share many of the same challenges.

Start Automating Now

Try Legito For Free

Contracts and leverage

Mar 30, 2022 | Weekly Automation Corner

Contracts and leverage

Contracts and leverage

Charles Drayson

Mar 30 · 2 min read

Charles Drayson

Mar 30 · 2 min read

Leverage allows a small force to move a big obstacle.

Organisations need leverage to grow, and so do people. Like it or not, some organisations use contracts to exert leverage. If you’re a smaller organisation trading with a Fortune 100 company, you probably don’t like it.

The child’s seesaw is a graphic often used to portray power between two organisations because it’s a visual representation of leverage.

The SME has to work pretty hard to balance the seesaw when faced with the typical contract demands of a big corporate. But, notice something else: this image shows the seesaw evenly balanced, but did you ever try to keep a seesaw in perfect balance? It’s hard. Each side is up or down – it’s unlikely that it stayed evenly balanced or stationery at some odd angle.

If you’re not careful, that’s how it is with contracts too.

 

 

Ideally, the legal teams in big corporates would stop sending out heavy contracts.
That’s not happening any time soon.

Until that day comes, how do you get leverage in contract negotiations?

Exploit the generality of Big Corp’s standard contracts

 Those contracts they issued were drafted by lawyers who knew nothing about your deal, your product, or the business need. They are necessarily generic and high-level. You have two opportunities:

  • Create your own contracts that are tightly aligned to what you do, and take the time to tailor them for each deal. Make them sensible (not just a list of disclaimers). Make it obvious that your contract is much better for both parties. If it’s not obvious, ask questions that expose the gaps.
  • Create modular contracts with modules that follow the rule above, and then you’ve got a good chance of adding the modules as schedules to the Big Corp standard document. In other words, let Bog Corp have their fun, but use your contracts to add the detail and colour to create some balance.

Make an effort to observe market norms

Feel free to ignore outdated and badly regarded market norms – like archaic language, or lengthy redundant text added by lawyers lacking confidence to know what’s important. Recognise the market norms that speak to your industry’s custom and practice, and the application of regulations and compliance that prevail in many sectors. If your contracts don’t look like they belong in your market, don’t be surprised if Big Corp insists on using a contract that does. Get some leverage by using contracts that meet expectations.

Stay up to date with changes

Legislation changes. Use your agility to stay up to date, and look credible. Big Corp might be slower. Expose the gaps to get some leverage.

Of course, Big Corp legal teams are free to use the same techniques, and then maybe contracts will be less hard work for everyone.

Leverage allows a small force to move a big obstacle.

Organisations need leverage to grow, and so do people. Like it or not, some organisations use contracts to exert leverage. If you’re a smaller organisation trading with a Fortune 100 company, you probably don’t like it.

The child’s seesaw is a graphic often used to portray power between two organisations because it’s a visual representation of leverage.

The SME has to work pretty hard to balance the seesaw when faced with the typical contract demands of a big corporate. But, notice something else: this image shows the seesaw evenly balanced, but did you ever try to keep a seesaw in perfect balance? It’s hard. Each side is up or down – it’s unlikely that it stayed evenly balanced or stationery at some odd angle.

If you’re not careful, that’s how it is with contracts too.

Ideally, the legal teams in big corporates would stop sending out heavy contracts.
That’s not happening any time soon.

Until that day comes, how do you get leverage in contract negotiations?

Exploit the generality of Big Corp’s standard contracts

Those contracts they issued were drafted by lawyers who knew nothing about your deal, your product, or the business need. They are necessarily generic and high-level. You have two opportunities:

  • Create your own contracts that are tightly aligned to what you do, and take the time to tailor them for each deal. Make them sensible (not just a list of disclaimers). Make it obvious that your contract is much better for both parties. If it’s not obvious, ask questions that expose the gaps.
  • Create modular contracts with modules that follow the rule above, and then you’ve got a good chance of adding the modules as schedules to the Big Corp standard document. In other words, let Bog Corp have their fun, but use your contracts to add the detail and colour to create some balance.

Make an effort to observe market norms

 Feel free to ignore outdated and badly regarded market norms – like archaic language, or lengthy redundant text added by lawyers lacking confidence to know what’s important. Recognise the market norms that speak to your industry’s custom and practice, and the application of regulations and compliance that prevail in many sectors. If your contracts don’t look like they belong in your market, don’t be surprised if Big Corp insists on using a contract that does. Get some leverage by using contracts that meet expectations.

Stay up to date with changes

 Legislation changes. Use your agility to stay up to date, and look credible. Big Corp might be slower. Expose the gaps to get some leverage.

Of course, Big Corp legal teams are free to use the same techniques, and then maybe contracts will be less hard work for everyone.

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Contracts and contract management: what does good look like?

Mar 23, 2022 | Weekly Automation Corner

Contracts and contract management

What does good look like?

Contracts and contract management

What does good look like?

Charles Drayson

Mar 23 · 2 min read
Charles Drayson
Mar 23 · 2 min read

Legito isn’t just for contracts or legal teams, but today we look at best practices in contracts and contract management.

Everybody is looking for ways to get contracts signed faster, but many organisations make it so darn hard.

Are your contracts reasonable, or are you using contracts as a big disclaimer? If you received the same terms, would you be happy to sign them? Sure, be legally prudent – but don’t use a contract to avoid all responsibility. 

Do your contracts say anything useful about what you are selling? Do they set clear expectations and describe steps that actually happen? Or, have you adopted some generic form that could just as easily apply to a different organisation? In short, are they useable?

Do your contracts look like they were drafted by a law clerk in the office of Charles Dickens? Are they full of archaic phrases and redundant ‘filler text’? Did the author create them by cutting and pasting from some crusty old text? For a candid appraisal of the disfunction in contract drafting, look up Ken Adams.

 

Is every deal a new adventure, or have you got a slick process for getting stuff done?

You want your customers to feel like you know your business, right? You want to look organised, consistent, and ready to deliver. Why, then, would you have a contract process that never flows the same way on any two deals and, worse, depends on the organising skills of an overworked contracts team? If you’re consistent and slick, it makes it easier for stakeholders to work with you.

Consistent and slick doesn’t mean inflexible and limited. Leave space for humans to do what humans do best, but give them tools to help them stay on top of the tedious tasks. Add only the controls that you need – it’s really hard to impose contracts and processes on customers unless you enjoy a monopoly in a market where customers want what you have.

Does your process recognise the reality in your customer’s world? Have you made it easy for customers to complete their procurement process? You know it’s coming, so anticipate it.

Organisations must learn from experience to make it better next time.

There will always be difficult customers who make it hard to get deals done. I’m not suggesting your contracts should appease the most unreasonable customers. But, if you regularly get the same old issues delaying deals from normal customers, it’s time to evolve.

There are at least three options to avoid history repeating itself:

 

  1. Keep the substance, but change the wording – do this when customers think you are imposing something worse than what you intend (usually because a lawyer tries too hard to be ‘watertight’).

     

  2. Remove the problem contract text if you can, or if it’s plainly unreasonable. You’ve been found out – deal with it.

     

  3. Do a better job of setting expectations upfront – so the problem doesn’t come as a surprise when it appears in a contract. For example, if you want payment in advance, get the sales team to make that clear in proposals and quotes.

Legito isn’t just for contracts or legal teams, but today we look at best practices in contracts and contract management.

Everybody is looking for ways to get contracts signed faster, but many organisations make it so darn hard.

 

Are your contracts reasonable, or are you using contracts as a big disclaimer? If you received the same terms, would you be happy to sign them? Sure, be legally prudent – but don’t use a contract to avoid all responsibility. 

Do your contracts say anything useful about what you are selling? Do they set clear expectations and describe steps that actually happen? Or, have you adopted some generic form that could just as easily apply to a different organisation? In short, are they useable?

Do your contracts look like they were drafted by a law clerk in the office of Charles Dickens? Are they full of archaic phrases and redundant ‘filler text’? Did the author create them by cutting and pasting from some crusty old text? For a candid appraisal of the disfunction in contract drafting, look up Ken Adams.

Is every deal a new adventure, or have you got a slick process for getting stuff done?

You want your customers to feel like you know your business, right? You want to look organised, consistent, and ready to deliver. Why, then, would you have a contract process that never flows the same way on any two deals and, worse, depends on the organising skills of an overworked contracts team? If you’re consistent and slick, it makes it easier for stakeholders to work with you.

Consistent and slick doesn’t mean inflexible and limited. Leave space for humans to do what humans do best, but give them tools to help them stay on top of the tedious tasks. Add only the controls that you need – it’s really hard to impose contracts and processes on customers unless you enjoy a monopoly in a market where customers want what you have.

Does your process recognise the reality in your customer’s world? Have you made it easy for customers to complete their procurement process? You know it’s coming, so anticipate it.

Organisations must learn from experience to make it better next time.

There will always be difficult customers who make it hard to get deals done. I’m not suggesting your contracts should appease the most unreasonable customers. But, if you regularly get the same old issues delaying deals from normal customers, it’s time to evolve.

There are at least three options to avoid history repeating itself:

  1. Keep the substance, but change the wording – do this when customers think you are imposing something worse than what you intend (usually because a lawyer tries too hard to be ‘watertight’).

     

  2. Remove the problem contract text if you can, or if it’s plainly unreasonable. You’ve been found out – deal with it.

     

  3. Do a better job of setting expectations upfront – so the problem doesn’t come as a surprise when it appears in a contract. For example, if you want payment in advance, get the sales team to make that clear in proposals and quotes.

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Legito PowerUp 2023

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Last year was my first time at the Legito conference, and I’d like to share my experiences and encourage you to join us this year. If you have no...

Read More
Citizen developer explained

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Citizen developers are also users. They want the solution to be the best it can be. Colleagues can walk across the office or have a Teams call to t...

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When Documents Meet Reality

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I am surely not alone in experiencing a situation where an organisation says one thing and does another. Why does that happen? I suspect process fa...

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Contracts tend to have defined terms, and the definitions are often grouped in one place. When reading a contract, it’s helpful to read the defin...

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Start Automating Now

Try Legito For Free
Back To Weekly Articles